TV channel owner ordered arrested in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela 
Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant Friday for the owner of a television channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez.

Intelligence agents arrived at a home owned by Guillermo Zuloaga seeking to arrest him and one of his sons Friday night, but their whereabouts were unknown, defense lawyer Perla Jaimes said.

Zuloaga is president and majority shareholder of Globovision, the country's only remaining channel on the airwaves that is stridently opposed to Chavez.

A court issued the warrant for the businessman and his son, also named Guillermo, citing accusations of illegally keeping 24 new Toyota sport-utility vehicles stored at a home owned by Zuloaga, Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. Zuloaga and his son are charged with usury and conspiracy.

Zuloaga has denied wrongdoing, saying the charges were trumped up in an attempt to intimidate him. Police and soldiers raided his property and found the vehicles in May 2009, but there had been little action in the case for months.

The arrest warrant came a week after Chavez publicly lamented that Zuloaga remained free.

"They caught that man with a bunch of cars in his house and that's a crime - hoarding. And he's free and he has a television channel," Chavez said in a televised speech. He called it a case of "structural weakness" in Venezuela's legal system.

Zuloaga, who also owns several car dealerships, has said he stored the cars on the property for safekeeping because one of his dealerships had been robbed.

He also is facing other accusations in court, including criminal charges filed earlier this year accusing Zuloaga accusing of making false and offensive remarks about Chavez at a meeting of the Inter American Press Association in Aruba.

The press association's president, Alejandro Aguirre, condemned the latest action as political persecution.

"Once again it's been shown that in Venezuela there's no independence of powers, an essential value of democracy, since the judicial branch seems to act every time the president speaks or orders it," Aguirre said in a statement. "It worries us that this is happening increasingly frequently."

Opposition leaders also strongly condemned the Zuloaga arrest warrant as an attempt by Chavez to intimidate critics and distract from domestic problems including a recession and the recent discovery of rotting food in government storage at a port.

Chavez has long accused Globovision and other opposition media outlets of conspiring against him. Globovision has been the only anti-Chavez channel on the air since another opposition-aligned channel, RCTV, was forced off cable and satellite TV in January. RCTV had been booted off the open airwaves in 2007.

In a June 3 speech, Chavez took issue with the fact that Zuloaga wasn't in jail in spite of the pending case against him for his remarks in Aruba.

"He's walking around free," Chavez said. "That only happens here in Venezuela. Let Zuloaga go to any other country and say the president ordered someone killed and let's see what happens. They'd put him in jail immediately."

Zuloaga accused Chavez of ordering security forces to open fire on a protest march that was headed toward the presidential palace shortly before a failed 2002 coup. Chavez maintains opponents were behind the bloodshed.

Zuloaga has said that what he did was simply "relate some historical events" and that Venezuelans have a right to say what they think about public figures such as presidents.

The attempt to arrest Zuloaga came as a Venezuelan journalist, Francisco Perez, was sentenced Friday in a separate case for slandering a public official. Perez, a veteran columnist for the newspaper El Carabobeno, called it a blatant violation of free speech and said he would appeal.

Perez was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison but was allowed to remain free on the condition he regularly appear in court and not practice journalism. Perez had written that Valencia Mayor Edgardo Parra, an ally of Chavez, had various family members on the city payroll.